by Lars Markull

Making time for the important things

I was hoping to finish a blog post today that I was working on this week, however, as the piece turned out to be more time consuming than expected I will have to postpone it to next week.

But in order not to skip this week’s blogpost, I will not write about a FinTech topic but rather a small personal change I have made in the last weeks. I have started to give more structure to my week than usual. I was not really unstructured before, but I felt there was still room for improvement. When I moved from Hamburg to Berlin in December 2016, was a greater call to incorporate some work structure as I am usually only two days per week at figo HQ in Hamburg (usually Tue & Thu). This resulted that internal meetings were only possible on these days but certain longer tasks were moved to the days when I was working in Berlin. But everything else – usually calls, emails or other tasks – were just happening whenever they fit in.

I came to the realisation that this is not the most efficient way for working. Therefore, I have created a new Google calendar, shared it with my work calendar and created time slots (aka blockers) for certain work. I have started doing this a few weeks and feel now pretty comfortable using it. I have used this Medium post as the foundation and adjusted it to my personal needs. I can highly recommend this article if you are wanting some more structure too!

Additionally to some of the time slots the article above is describing, I have also added three other work-related time slots / blockers that I personally hope to have a lot of impact:

45min for blogging: Usually, I have been blogging whenever I found the time, but way too often I skipped it because other things got my priority.

60min for Quora: I have just added this new time slot to my calendar today. I have been absent from Quora for way too long, hopefully returning next week.

60min for calls: I enjoy discussing and brainstorming around Open Banking and FinTech. I do this a lot with the people from my network, however, the greatest impact is usually happening when I talk to people I don’t spend much time with. Thus, I have added a Calendly link to my “Get in touch” page and invite everybody who wants to get in touch with me to just schedule a call with me. I am not sure how often this will be used, but I have blocked an hour for this every week. And I promise to invest the time into blogging or Quora if no one schedules a call 😉